Month: January 2021

[Link]: Stateless Protocols

Leo Babauta, again, continues with this incessantly great stream of ideas if you want to become effective at whatever it is you do. Extending the concept of stateless computing, he states 😀 in Stateless: 

you just do what’s in front of you right now, in the moment. If you’re creating art, you work with what’s in front of you on the canvas, in your heart and mind, and create the art right then. This doesn’t have to be about all art that came before it, and everything else you need to do. It’s just you and this canvas and paint, right now.

 

Thoughts from RStudio::Global(2021)

I attended RStudio’s annual conference: RStudio::Global(2021) yesterday. Driven online by the pandemic, it was a fabulous day – even if a very long one – to listen to some fantastic keynotes, long & short long talks, & virtual conversations in between.

I have heaps of thoughts about this conference I will write about in due course but there’s  one thing that continues to stand out most for me: the warmth & inclusive nature of the R community. Whether it’s on the Twitterverse, the R User Groups around the world, or in meetups that are hosted by people passionate about sharing their knowledge and improving their own, the R community very certainly has a strong leadership in RStudio & its team. Particularly, there were more women in this code/tech community, whether presenting or attending, than in any other I have seen (admittedly, I’m not a technologist so I could be wrong),  more people from diverse backgrounds that presented their talks in a language they were comfortable even in this global setting. The subtitling feature in Spanish, Mandarin & English made those talks also accessible to everyone.

The team at RStudio did a fantastic job of curating this: pre-recorded talks that didn’t go over time, technology that almost never went awry, and scheduling the talks to run in 2 cycles so literally anyone around the globe could dial in.  There were opportunities to connect using a virtual chat room between the scheduled talks, just like you would in a F2F conference (is that a thing?) I heard someone mention that last year’s conference drew 2000 people, and this year, doing it entirely online drew over 10000+. Great job indeed.

 

[Link] Data Science as an atomic habit – Malcolm Barrett

Malcolm Barrett has practical ideas for anyone interested in a data science career, inspired from James Clear’s book  Atomic Habits.

So what would an atomic habit for becoming a data scientist look like? Here are a few ideas:

  1. Open RStudio and type “Good morning, R” into the console. That’s it. Seriously.
  2. Write code for 5 minutes
  3. Use one new function. Reading the help page counts.
  4. Make a single commit on git.

Stacking these habits might look something like: “Every morning after I make coffee, I’ll write code for five minutes.”

A Young Poet

As soon as I rolled out of bed this morning, I found a notification about a poetry recital. I’ve never been one inclined towards poetry, but 2020 has made me aware of its power.

The notification was about 22 year youth poet laureate, Amanda Gorman’s recital of her “The Hill We Climb” poem this morning at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Listening to her made my hair stand on end.  She is the youngest poet laureate ever invited to a White House Inauguration. The clarity of the message from this young woman, among so many other things, was inspiring.

I shared it immediately with my daughter & the two young women I have been helping, over the last month or so, to consider how to tackle their own looming adult futures. I don’t know if they listened to it with the same admiration I did, but I hope they listened to the power of her words, the beauty of her inspiring vision, “for there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. if only we’re brave enough to become it.”

Mohammed Qahtani, Toastmasters World Champion of 2015, concluded his winning speech with “Words have power, words are power, words could be your power. You can change a life, inspire your nation and make up this world a beautiful place. Isn’t that what we all want it?”

Listening to Ms. Gorman recite this stirring, powerful, inspiring poem, at a point in time when not just the US, but the world needed it, was an honor and a privilege.

The full text:

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it.

Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.

That even as we grieved, we grew.

That even as we hurt, we hoped.

That even as we tired, we tried.

That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.

Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.

We feared at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.

But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.

Our blunders become their burdens.

But one thing is certain.

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the golden hills of the West.

We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sun-baked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.

The new dawn balloons as we free it.

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

​

 

[Link] Never too late

Alison Barnes, writing in the Guardian, about joining art class:

When you leave work you’re usually an expert in whatever you did. Then you start something new and everyone is younger than you, they know more than you do, they’re probably better at risk-taking, I think they’re better educated. It’s easy to feel intimidated. But remember you have skills that you’ll be able to build on.

[Link] High School News

Jack Clark’s Tech Tales in his Import AI blog are fantastic fictional stories of the potential future with all things Artificial Intelligence.  Here’s his latest, in full:

Tech Tales:

High School News:
[The South Bay, California, the early 2020s]

He’d hated Teddy for a couple of years. Teddy was tall and had hit puberty early and all the other kids liked him. Because Teddy was kind of smart and kind of handsome, the girls were fascinated with him as well. He had a lot of the same classes as Teddy and he’d sit in the back, staring at Teddy as he answered questions and flashed smiles to the other kids.

One night, he read a tutorial about how to use some AI stuff to generate stories. He built a website called The Winchester News and set up the AI stuff to scrape the web and copy news articles about the school, then subtly tweak them to avoid plagiarism allegations. Then he set it up so one out of every hundred news stories would mention Teddy in connection to stories about drugs and pornography circulating among children at the school.

It was fiction, of course. The most serious stuff at Winchester was cheap hash which they called soapbar. Kids would smoke it in the bushes near the sports fields at lunch. And Teddy wasn’t one of those kids.

But after a few days, other kids thought Teddy was one of those kids. He’d sit in the back of class and watch the phonescreens of his classmates and look at them reading The Winchester News and sometimes glancing over to Teddy. He watched as Teddy opened his phone, checked a messaging app, clicked on a link, and started reading a “news” article about Teddy dealing drugs and pornography. Teddy didn’t react, just fiddled with his phone a bit more, then returned to studying.

Days went by and he watched the traffic on his website go up. He started getting news “tips” from people who had read the AI-generated articles.
– Teddy is sleeping with an underage girl from the lower school.
– Teddy cheated on his science exam, he had the answers written on some paper which was curled up inside his pen lid.
– Teddy is addicted to pornography and watches it in class.

Of course, he published these tips – gave them as the priming device to his AI system, then let it do the rest. The news stories took a few minutes to generate – he’d get his machine to spit out a bunch of variants, then select the ones that felt like they might get a rise out of people. That night he dreamed that his website started publishing stories about him rather than Teddy, dreamed that someone threw a brick through his window.

Teddy wasn’t at school the next day. Or the day after that.

The teachers had been meeting with Teddy and Teddy’s parents, concerned about the news stories. He’d anonymized The Winchester News enough that people thought it was a low-rent legitimate news outfit – one that had sprung up to serve the kids and parents around the school, likely backed by some private equity firm.

After he heard about the meetings, he stopped generating articles about Teddy. But he didn’t delete the old ones – that might seem suspicious. How would the news site know to delete these? What would cause it? So he left them up.

Like all kids, he wasn’t very good at imagining what it was like to be other kids. So he just watched Teddy, after Teddy came back to school. Noticed how he wasn’t smiling so much, and how the girls weren’t talking to him in the same way. Teddy checked his phone a lot, after the news stories had been circulating for months. He became more distracted in class. He seemed to be distracted a lot, looking out the window, or messaging people on his phone.

One night, he dreamed that Teddy came into his room and started reading out the news stories. “Teddy is alleged to have been the key dealer behind the spike in drug consumption at the Winchester School,” Teddy said, holding up a giant piece of paper and reading headlines from it.
“Teddy was reprimanded for circulating pornography to younger children,” Teddy said.
“Teddy’s continued actions call into question the moral and ethical standing of the school,” Teddy said.
And then Teddy put the paper down and stared at him, in his dream. “What do you think?” Teddy said. “It’s in the news so I guess it must be true”.

Things that inspired this story: Generative models and the potential abuses of them; teenagers and how they use technology; thinking about what happens when news stories get generated by AI systems; a rumor I heard about some kid who used a language model to generate some ‘fake news’ to settle some grievances; the incentive structure of technology; how our networks connect us and also open us to different forms of attack.